word | spirit | world | church
This is the time of waiting. It doesn’t look like it if you look around you though. We must be one of the most impatient cultures yet to grace the face of the earth, which is why I’m convinced we need to recover some sense of Advent as a counter-cultural act. This is the time… Continue reading Advent is for Waiting
We live in a deeply connected world. There are some signs that geopolitically that might be changing, but individually it’s as true as ever. The distraction devices in our pockets keep us connected to each other, people with our specific interests, what’s going on in the world, things somewhere we should be anxious about that… Continue reading Practising Disconnection
Who would be for it? This might see like the easiest thing to argue in the world: exhaustion is bad. Of course there is a kind of tiredness which is good: a body worn out from hard work in the field (he types from behind his laptop) or a mind worn out from hard graft… Continue reading Against Exhaustion
The church is facing a number of issues right now. Here in the UK the ongoing crisis of leadership in the wake of numerous high-profile cases of Pastors abusing their positions might be the most obvious. I’ve written about another crisis, of discipleship, where the average Christian’s faith doesn’t touch the sides of their life.… Continue reading Navigating the Crises
As I write, Christianity Today have just published an article extolling the use of ChatGPT for Pastors in their preparation for preaching and Bible studies. It has gone viral for all of the wrong reasons. I am, as you’ll have picked up, committed to ‘cold takes’, so I’m naturally wary about deciding that you really… Continue reading Beginning to think about Generative AI
I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified. On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing,… Continue reading Repost: Next Level Discipleship
I had the internet in my home before I went to secondary school, in the late 90s. I think we were on the earlier edge of that, my Dad worked for one of the biggest IT giants in the world, but I was exposed to the early internet at a formative age. I am, by… Continue reading Digital Reality
It’s something of a truism that we’re formed by everything around us. It’s common for people to point out that in the average church you’ve got at best two hours of people’s time a week to use to form them towards Christ—you might get a third of them for another two hours midweek—and everything else… Continue reading The Need for Christian Formation
We live in a world of constant connection. We carry with us little black glass ‘communication’ devices that mean we’re connected at all times; there is no situation in which we can’t be reached or distracted or bothered by an economy built on attention. We’ve all been there: you’re having a deep conversation with a… Continue reading Constant Connection
We live in a digital world. Except, we don’t really, we live in a perfectly ordinary analogue world, but we visit and intersect with an ephemeral digital one all of the time. So, what does discipleship look like in a digital world? This is an important question if we want to follow Jesus as well… Continue reading 6 steps to digital discipleship
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